This invention relates to expert systems, and in particular to a system in which computational resources are invoked by a user without direct intervention.
The increasing use of expert systems as diagnostic tools in service industries has established that knowledge embedded systems can provide quality expertise within defined domains. Most prior systems, however, do not appreciate the usefulness of technical documentation as a resource for human experts when performing diagnostic tasks. On-line technical manuals can aid the user by greatly enhancing the potential for success. Typical prior art systems which do recognize this asset simply provide interfaces for browsing on-line documentation in a xe2x80x9chelp textxe2x80x9d format. This documentation, however, is usually the result of experts and developers rewriting, in an abbreviated form, the content of technical manuals. The exact technical documentation contained in the manuals, and used by most technicians in the field, is not provided. By rewriting the documentation, the experts and developers increase the time to develop a system, and decrease the original content. Because the documentation does not rely on the actual manuals, which are maintained independently, the life cycle costs of maintaining this xe2x80x9chelp textxe2x80x9d documentation is high.
Some help systems have relied on expert systems to add xe2x80x9cintelligencexe2x80x9d to the help system. One such prior art system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,103,498, entitled xe2x80x9cIntelligent Help System.xe2x80x9d In that system a monitoring device xe2x80x9cwatchesxe2x80x9d the system-user interface and determines what monitoring information to store. This information, together with the physical state of the system, is stored in a knowledge base. An inference engine tests rules against the knowledge base data to generate help text. Unfortunately, in this system the user must request help, and that help is supplied as help text.
A system applied specifically to the medical information field provided a method of automatic information retrieval by evaluating the observed manifestations and possible diagnosis. It then provided access to relevant medical texts. The system is described in P. L. Elkin, et al., xe2x80x9cClosing the Loop on Diagnostic Decision Support Systems,xe2x80x9d 14th Annual Symposium on Computer Applns. in Medical Care, Standards in Medical Informatics, Washington, D.C. (Nov. 1990), IEEE Computer Soc. Press. Unfortunately, the technical details of the system are still unclear.
Furthermore, in many prior art systems computational resources typically were, in a sense, turned xe2x80x9conxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9coffxe2x80x9d by the user. By this we mean that the user decided when to process particular information to determine interrelationships among all of the entered information. In such systems users are unaware of all of the capabilities of the system and thus often overlook valuable computational resources.
Another restriction of prior art systems is that they are restricted to locally available computational resources and do not take advantage of remote computational resources available via a network.
The present invention provides a system which automatically invokes external computational resources without user intervention. In one embodiment, a base application, typically a computer program, is used interactively by a user. An agent monitors interactions between the user and a base application. As use progresses, a variety of internal calculations are performed by the agent based upon interactions between the user and the base application. When these calculations determine that additional information could be of benefit to the user based on the information entered, then the availability of that additional information is made known to the user. If the user desires the additional information, it can be displayed for review. Alternatively, the user can continue with analysis, reserving a review of the additional information for later. Preferably, in this system a belief network is employed to enable probabilistic or other determinations to be made of the likely importance of the information available.
A preferred system, according to the present invention employs an information retrieval method which, unlike prior systems, uses the exact technical documentation contained in the existing user or other technical manuals. It does not require the user to know of the existence of information to receive it. Furthermore, the system does not simply offer on-line access to help text, but instead provides contextual pointers (based on the context of the expert system) to the user manual documentation. Whereas most on-line information access systems require the user to enter a search query and request processing of that query when searching for relevant information, this system does not. The availability of relevant information is provided automatically or xe2x80x9cquery-freexe2x80x9d as the user works on a diagnostic problem. This is achieved by evaluating the context of the diagnostic session and automatically accessing the appropriate technical documentation. Additionally, the text provided when it is requested is that of the user manualsxe2x80x94text with which the user is already familiar. Any updates to the hard copy documentation can be electronically uploaded into this system, so the hard copy and electronic copy of the manual are always consistent.
In a preferred embodiment, an information retrieval system which employs the present invention includes a computing system in which is stored documentation relating to the apparatus to be investigated as well as probabilistic information relating individual symptoms to faults in the apparatus which may cause such symptoms. The user of the system employs some means of data entry, typically a keyboard to select from a menu on a screen, to allow the user to enter symptoms concerning the apparatus being investigated. In response, the system calculates probabilities of the individual faults as indicated by the symptoms they cause. The possible faults are displayed, and the user is given an opportunity to select documentation related to the possible faults.
In one embodiment, one or more of the base application, computational resource, and agent are located on a computer system remote from the user. Also, the agent may query multiple computational resources via a network.
A further understanding of the nature and advantages of the inventions herein may be realized by reference to the remaining portions of the specification and the attached drawings.